About Trove
Trove is a place to collect images that inspire you, arranged into boards you can keep to yourself or share. It started as a personal side project: a calmer alternative to the big inspiration sites, without ads, feeds or algorithms, where your collection stays yours.
Instead of running its own storage, Trove is built on top of Google Drive. Your boards are ordinary folders and your images ordinary files in your own Drive. Trove is the window you look at them through.
Privacy
Your images stay in your Google Drive
Everything you add is stored in a Trove folder in your own Google Drive. Trove has no database and keeps no copy of your images or details. This page talks to Google Drive directly from your browser; your images never pass through Trove’s server.
The server does exactly one thing: it keeps you signed in. Google’s sign-in key is stored encrypted in a cookie in your own browser, not on the server.
What Trove can access
Trove asks Google for access to your Drive so it can show boards that others share with you and images you add from the Drive app. Trove only reads and changes its own folder and the boards you open, but Google’s permission technically covers your whole Drive. You can withdraw it at any time in your Google account’s connections.
Trove’s own settings, such as which boards you’ve looked at recently, are kept in a hidden folder in your Drive that only Trove can see.
Images added through Trove are signed with the first name of whoever added them, so others can see who added what. To tell which images you added before they were signed, and to show new comments on your boards and on the Activity page, Trove reads (but never changes) the activity history in Google Drive.
What Trove removes
- Location and camera details hidden in photos (EXIF: GPS position, camera serial number, …) are removed before upload. The image itself isn’t changed.
- Source links are saved without tracking parameters or anything that looks like a password or access key.
Sharing, and what others can see
Sharing a board is Google Drive sharing: Trove sets the folder’s permissions for you. In Trove, people appear by their first name and Google photo, and email addresses are never shown to others.
Some things are Google Drive’s and Trove can’t hide them:
- Public boards (“anyone with the link”) can be opened directly in Google Drive, which shows the owner’s Google name, photo and email address. If that matters to you, use a separate Google account for public boards.
- Comments are Google Drive comments and carry the commenter’s Google name and photo, visible to everyone who can see the board.
- Collaborators who can add images are Drive editors: through Google Drive they can also rename things and remove images. Only invite people you trust.
- Images you add to someone else’s board move into the board owner’s Drive, so they decide what happens to them.
On this device
To open quickly, Trove keeps a copy of your board list, image details and small thumbnails in this browser. Signing out removes them.
No tracking
Trove has no ads, analytics or tracking. The site is hosted on Cloudflare and uses Google’s sign-in and fonts, so those services see that you visited, as for any website using them. Google’s own privacy policy applies to what you store in Google Drive.
Leaving Trove
Your images are already yours: they stay in your Google Drive whether or not you use Trove. To remove everything, delete the Trove folder in Google Drive and remove Trove from your Google account’s connections.